1862: General Ulysses Grant orders dozens of Jewish people to be expelled from his military district of Tennessee, Mississippi, and Kentucky. Grant’s Order No. 11 grew out of Grant’s misguided belief that Jews were “corrupting” Union soldiers. President Abraham Lincoln would object to Grant’s order less than a month later, causing Grant to rescind it.
Clockwise from top left: the international sex worker protection day established in 2003; Dorothy Fuldheim, America’s first female news anchor; The Arab Spring protests in Tunisia; and the Wright brothers’ first flight.
1903: The first-ever powered flight of an aircraft happens for 12 seconds when Wilbur and Orville Wright take off from Kitty Hawk, N.C. The brothers had spent three years testing, collecting data, and building a prototype.Â
1914: The first legislation regulating drugs in the United States is signed by President Woodrow Wilson. The Harrison Narcotics Tax Act required strict record-keeping of the import and export of opioids and cocaine and was an effort to stop the proliferation of cocaine in the United States.
1943: America’s first-ever immigration ban based on country of origin is overturned after more than 60 years. The Chinese Exclusion Act, passed in 1882 when several western states began to feel threatened by Chinese immigrants, was overturned largely because of World War II, in which the United States needed China as an ally.
1944: An estimated 125,000 Japanese-Americans who had been forced out of their homes because of World War II are released from internment camps. They’d been removed by order of President Franklin Roosevelt and the U.S. military. Forty-four years later, President Ronald Reagan would officially apologize to, and compensate, those Japanese-Americans who had been forcibly held in camps.
1947: Dorothy Fuldheim, 54, becomes America’s first female news anchor, helping to launch Cleveland’s Channel 5 WEWS-TV. Fuldheim stayed on the job for the next 35 years, interviewing figures as diverse as Adolf Hitler and Muhammad Ali and travelling internationally to cover pivotal stories.
1963: The U.S. government is empowered to regulate air quality, when the groundbreaking Clean Air Act becomes law, providing funding for states’ air quality efforts and also enabling the federal government to intervene when one state’s air was impacted by another’s pollution.
1989: The Simpsons airs its first episode on Fox and goes on to become America’s longest-running sitcom. Now with over 800 episodes across 37 seasons, the series is credited with paving the way for adult animation that now includes South Park and Beavis & Butthead.
1997: New Jersey becomes the first state to allow same-sex and unmarried heterosexual couples to adopt children. The change in policy came after LGBTQ+ rights groups threatened legal action against the state’s child welfare officials. Today, four percent of all adopted children in the U.S. have same-sex parents.
2003: The first annual International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers takes place, organized by colleagues of women murdered by Gary Ridgeway, who became known as the Green River Killer. Ridgeway is thought to have murdered up to 80 women, many of them sex workers, near his hometown of Reston, Wash., in the 19802 and 1990s.
2010: The Arab Spring uprising throughout the Middle East and North Africa begins, after Tunisian street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi sets himself on fire. to protest police harassment and corruption. Â Protests break out throughout the Arab world for two years, triggering some dictators to be replaced but also creating civil unrest, high unemployment and worsening human rights violations.
